Free Stormwalker by Allyson James Page A

alive?” he asked, half in horror, half in fascination.
    Maya looked over at him, her bleak look replaced with impatience. “I doubt it. The paneling was dry-rotted and easy to pull apart. Even a weak person could have kicked it out. It doesn’t look like she was tied up or anything, as far as I can tell.”
    “You looked?” Fremont asked.
    “Of course I did. Don’t tell me you’re not curious.”
    Of the three of us, Maya seemed the most contained; in fact, she looked angry. Maybe she used anger to cover her true feelings, but Maya always looked angry, so how could I tell?
    “When you bought this hotel, didn’t you notice that there was a body in the basement?” she asked me.
    I stuck my hands in my pockets. “The building inspector didn’t mention it in his report.”
    “Very funny.”
    “Do you think Nash is right?” Fremont asked. “That it’s not Amy?”
    Maya shrugged. She was good at shrugging, managing to put a day’s worth of insolence in a quick rise and fall of shoulders. “How should I know? I’m not an expert on dead bodies.” She eyed me. “Can’t you tell with your mystical senses? Or Navajo medicine magic, or whatever?”
    “I take it you’re an Unbeliever?”
    Maya laughed, the laughter edged with anger. “Damn right. There’s nothing in this town but frauds and con artists. There aren’t any vortexes; there isn’t any ‘mystical energy’ crap. It’s all a big, fat, tourist-trap lie, and you’re not doing anything but encouraging it.”
    Her vehemence puzzled me. I’d never extolled the mystical virtues of Magellan, never joined in the group singalongs Heather Hansen led at the vortexes on nights of the full moon. “So, definitely an Unbeliever,” I said.
    “You got it.”
    Fremont shook his head. “You don’t see what’s under your nose, Maya Medina.”
    “You’re just as bad,” she snapped at him. “Telling everyone you’re a magician. You can’t even fix Janet’s plumbing.”
    “I’m working on it. The system is ancient.”
    “So go work on it, then.”
    Fremont gave me a look that said, “Humor her; she’s a little nuts,” and went back inside.
    Maya and I stood in uncompanionable silence a few moments, while sirens sprang up in the distance, Salas answering Jones’s call from the far side of Magellan.
    “I think she was killed elsewhere,” I said, thinking out loud. “And someone brought her and put her behind the wall.”
    “Well, it wasn’t me.”
    “Any reason it should have been?”
    “ Dios , you’re nosy. All right, if I don’t tell you, someone else will. I hated Amy McGuire. Hated her skinny, blond, goody-two-shoes ass, and I wasn’t sorry when she disappeared.”
    I hadn’t mentioned Amy specifically, but Maya gave me a defiant look, as though she expected me to be shocked or appalled. I was neither. I wasn’t here to pass judgment on what people thought about Amy; I was here to figure out what had happened to her.
    “Anyone share your views?” I asked. “Enough to want to make her vanish? Or kill her and wall her up in my basement?”
    “Are you kidding? Everyone loved Amy McGuire. She was prom queen and sang in her church choir and was in the honor society. She went to U of A on a big scholarship. God knows why she moved back here.”
    “To get married to Sheriff Jones?”
    “They got engaged after she came back from college.” Maya’s mouth flattened. “Everyone loved Amy, Nash Jones most of all.”
    She didn’t bother to hide her rage. Here we were at a murder scene, the victim possibly a woman she’d hated, and Maya was venting about her. The surge of anger when she mentioned Nash didn’t escape me either, nor had the way she’d laughed when the coyote had emptied his bladder on Nash’s tire. Interesting.
    The sirens grew louder. A car marked “Magellan Police” turned onto the lot, dust spiraling into the blue sky behind it. I left Maya and went to greet Assistant Chief Salas and a younger uniformed cop who